After a 7½-hour debate, in which 90 peers spoke, the House of Lords voted by 148 to 100 to delay for six months the second reading of the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill. As the current parliamentary session will almost certainly end by then, the amendment effectively killed the Private Member’s Bill, despite claims that public opinion has shifted to the arguments in favour.

Lord Warner, the Health Minister, told peers earlier that the Government was listening carefully to the debate and would not seek to block its second reading but considered it right that Parliament should lead the debate. All peers were given a free vote, since the issue was one of conscience.

Lord Joffe, the crossbench peer who has introduced two similar Bills in previous sessions, cited opinion polls suggesting that up to 80 per cent of people were in favour of such a form of controlled euthanasia administered by the patient on the advice of a doctor. He vowed yesterday to reintroduce another Bill in the next session, and keep doing so until such legislation had been debated in all its parliamentary stages.

A well-funded pressure group, Care Not Killing, fought the Bill on behalf of churches, palliative care organisations and other groups, and peers were bombarded with letters and other literature.

Lord Joffe opened the debate by urging peers to recognise that the heavy mailbags that they had received were generated by an unrepresentative lobby led by the Roman Catholic Church. This included sending 500,000 letters or DVDs to Catholics urging them to write to peers and MPs, he said.

“The letters come from a relatively small number of deeply committed Christian worshippers and are the result of a massive political campaign by the churches led by the Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff [the Right Rev Peter Smith],” he said. Lord Joffe’s proposal was modelled on a system adopted by Oregon, in the United States, and would have allowed competent terminally ill adults to end their lives with an injection or medication supplied by a doctor.

It failed after Lord Carlile of Berriew, a Liberal Democrat peer, successfully moved an amendment to delay its second reading. It was the first time that the Lords had voted on the second reading of a Private Member’s Bill for eight years, since usual practice in the Lords is to allow legislation to proceed to its later stages.

Opposition to the Bill was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who argued that it would jeopardise the vulnerable. He told peers: “Whether or not you believe that God enters into the consideration . . . to specify . . . conditions under which it would be both reasonable and legal to end your life is to say that certain kinds of life are not worth living.”

Prominent supporters of the Bill included Baroness Jay of Paddington, a former Leader of the Lords, who told peers: “We have to recognise that some terminally ill people would prefer to end their lives in a controlled and dignified manner, rather than receive care until a so-called natural death.”

Lord McColl of Dulwich, who spoke from the Conservative front bench, called the Bill “morally indefensible and completely unnecessary”. Baroness Williams of Crosby, the Liberal Democrat peer, said: “In a society which has a national health service, intrinsic to the success of that service is the profound trust between a physician and his or her patients.”

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